Ben Soul

by Richard George

the offerings of water worshippers gave to the lingam. Jean invented a convoluted tale about a threatening Poh’s approaching him, waving a knife. That Poh had no knife was not a fact the sergeant observed, or cared about. Poh was just one more dead native, and, since they weren’t French, unimportant in the universal scheme of things.

  Poh’s chi flowed from his dying body to mingle with the lingam’s chi in the bamboo Buddha he had woven in his trance. So much power concentrated in a simple artifact gave it a life of its own. Jean D’Arme immediately succumbed to its magic, picked it up as he got up to salute his sergeant, and tucked it in his pack.

  Private Jean D’Arme shipped out, several months later, for France. On the way, the vessel carrying him home docked at the City to re-provision. Jean, granted shore leave, took advantage of a naïve local girl, Carrie Vann, and got her with child. He then got very drunk. His outfit’s military police found him, and took him aboard his ship in chains. They left the bamboo Buddha behind. Jean’s returned to France, where an unscrupulous Marsellais pimp accused him of unseemly advances (Jean was drunk, again, and mistook the pimp for one of the working girls). The judge sentenced Jean to life on Devil’s Island, where he died of dysentery induced by a parasite in his gruel. The bamboo Buddha remained in the Vann family for several generations, until Minnie gave it to Benjamin Dover Soul.

  Ben Goes Back

  It took an hour for Ben to drive to the modest suburban home he had shared with Len. The neighborhood had not changed noticeably in the several months Ben had lived in the Village, but his perspective on it had. It looked far drabber to him now than it formerly had. It lacked the touch of a unicorn with a unique horn, there were no llamas on the horizon, and the neighbors, as far as Ben knew them, had very ordinary lives. Ben parked in the drive, got out of the car, and walked to the door. He hesitated there, pretending to search for the key. He did not want to enter. Something waited behind the door to confront him.

  “I’ve been dealing with strange things too long,” he muttered to himself. “Now I’m imagining monsters behind closed doors. Open it up, Ben.” He put the key in the lock, took a deep breath, and turned it. He turned the knob and the door opened easily. No monster greeted him in the foyer.

  A hush lay over the house, the hush of a home left vacant. Dust filmed everything, of course, from the grandfather clock in the entrance to what Ben could see of the tables and chairs beyond. The clock was silent, its pendulum still. Nothing ticked or creaked in the house. Ben shut the front door. He went into the living room. The cousin who had stayed there had re-arranged the Chinese chairs (Len had insisted they get rid of all the couches and overstuffed chairs because they were too hard to get out of). Ben felt the room was alien, a showplace for someone else’s life. He did not recognize this room as a place where he had meandered through the mornings and afternoons of his life.

  The kitchen, of course, had changed little. The spare bedroom where Len had spent those last suffering weeks was a neutral space now. Visiting nurses had cleared away the hospital bed and its attendant machinery for the dying. A simple twin bed, made up with a white on white chenille spread and two fat pillows stood in the center. A plain pine bureau, only three drawers tall, with no mirror, stood on the left side of the bed. A generic maple rocker sat near the head of the bed on the left hand side. Even the curtains at the window were new, a white cotton ensemble that Ben did not recognize.

  The bedroom Ben had shared with Len had changed little; the cousin had moved the entire ensemble of bed, bureau, and vanity counterclockwise ninety degrees, but this did not change the room’s character. Ben and Len had moved the furniture around the room several times in the years they had lived here. Still, Ben did not sense Len in the room. It was a sterile memory, antisepticised of feeling.

  Ben walked back into the living room and sat in one of the Chinese chairs, the one whose back was a carved rosewood dragon. He had forgotten how uncomfortable it could be. He slid forward and braced himself against the arms to avoid the dragon’s snout puncturing his vertebrae. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine Len sitting next to him. He couldn’t conjure Len’s image. The vague outlines were there, Len’s mane of brown hair threaded lightly with silver, and the warmth of Len’s presence, these he could remember. He couldn’t call Len’s face to mind in any detail.

  Ben opened his eyes and looked around the room. He understood with a sudden flash of self-awareness that he didn’t belong here anymore. This space was the cocoon of a Ben who had also passed on, Len’s Ben. Ben smiled ruefully and shook his head slightly as he stared at the blue-gray carpet between his feet. It had been a great life while it went on, but now it was over, over inside himself. Len, his protector and mentor, Len his man and his lover, had gone, gone painfully, into that twilit nether region of what used to be. His living presence had become a memory, and now Ben must pack all the joys and hurts tied to the memory away in boxes in his heart. He might take them out and fondle them occasionally, but they were storage items now.

  Ben thought about what practical steps he must take next. He went to the roll-top desk and opened a drawer on the right side. He took a stack of business cards bound in a rubber band from it, thumbed through them, and nodded. In the next few days he would arrange to sell the furniture and put the house on the market. Most of the treasures he might want to keep were already boxed and in the attic or the garage. He would arrange storage for those.

  He went to the car, locking the house behind him, and drove to a nearby mall where he knew there was still a pay phone. He made the several calls he needed to make to set matters in motion, and got in his car again, pointed it north, and drove home to the Village with a lightened heart.

  What Does the Egret Regret

  Ben had reached the marshes north of the City and its suburbs before he realized how tightly he had been gripping the steering wheel on his car. An internal dialogue he preferred to proceed without his overhearing it had tightened his muscles. His fingers ached, and pains shot up from them through his elbows into his shoulders and his neck. He took several deep breaths, trying to relax, before he decided he needed to stop and walk off some of his tension. The time had come to face something he had been thrusting away for months.

  There was a vista point at the side of the marsh highway. Ben pulled in and stopped the car. He forced his fingers from the wheel and flexed them several times. Some of the ache disappeared in the tingle of blood flowing more freely through his hands. He sighed, and took the keys from the ignition and got out of the car to stand in the cold breeze blowing off the Bay over the marshes. Len had often said that a cold wind could clear cobwebs from a cluttered mind.

  The salt-tolerant grasses and shrubs, all low growing, colored the marsh subtle shades of red, olive, brown, and yellow. Patches of dark water glittered under the cold gray skies. A white wading bird, that Ben guessed was an egret, stood still as stone not far from him. Its neck curved in a graceful “s” shape over its body.

  A quote from something he had read or heard in the past came to mind: “What does the egret regret?” He could not recall the source of it. He repeated the phrase in his mind, turning it into a kind of mantra that slowly drew the tension from his system. In its place, Ben sensed a great emptiness.

  “What does the egret regret?” became “What do I regret?” Ben mentally muttered the question several times before he noticed what he was asking himself.

  “I regret nothing,” he said aloud. The egret ignored him.

  “Are you sure you have nothing to regret?” the voice prodded him.

  “Yes, I am,” he responded.

  “Don’t you regret selling off the things you shared with Len?” The voice accused Ben with its tone; Ben reacted with anger.

  “No, I do not.” He almost snarled the words. He listened to the tick of the cooling engine for a moment, hoping to silence the voice within. More calmly he went on, “Len and I had our run.
It’s over now. All I have of him is a collection of memories, mostly happy ones, but memories.”

  The voice went on. “Len took care of you, kept watch over you when you were a new kid on the block. You owe him for that.” The voice sounded very much like Ben’s father talking.

  “And when he got old,” Ben snapped back, “and was too sick to take care of himself, I took care of him.”

  “Len was like a father to you.” The voice sighed. “You were with him most of your adult life.”

  “Yes, and now I don’t have him, because it was his time to go.” Sadness welled in Ben. He flashed on Minnie, surrounded by the paraphernalia of death, and losing her. She had taken care of him, too, when he was naïve and inexperienced. “Just as I don’t have Minnie, not for much longer,” he said. “Most of the people who surrounded me when I was young are gone, some to Heaven, some to Hell, some to the Southland.”

  Ben felt moisture on his cheek, and wiped it away with the back of his hand. He realized, suddenly, he had been crying with his eyes open. Usually he cried with his eyes shut. He wrapped his arms around his stocky torso and held himself while his tears washed the grief from his eyes.

  “They’re gone,” he said